You can create custom reports, custom dashboards, and segments to interrogate the data in different ways. In this post I’ll look at how to create a custom segment. Apologies to the analytics experts out there, but this is more of a post for beginners… Why do you need segments? Well, they offer some very useful insight which allows you to learn more about your audience behaviour. For example, you can use segments to see which visitors arrived at your site using a mobile device, which country they are in, sessions which resulted in a conversion, and so on. Google has ‘pre-loaded’ analytics with a number of useful segments which you can use straight away.
Segment by visitor type. Referrer or traffic source. By country /region. Value. Demographics. Device/browser used. How many users performed a site search. Paid traffic. Users with multiple sessions, as below:
Useful though these segments are, if you want to know something that Google hasn’t included in … [Read more...] about How to create custom segments in Google Analytics

Every website has a purpose, including small steps for users to complete as well as the more important desired activity. Think registering an account (micro conversion) and completing an order (macro conversion). Goals are there to help us track these activities, to help us make it easier for people to complete them on our sites, and to measure success of the website and its marketing activity. In order for Google Analytics to work for every website, Goals need to be configured in each account depending on the content of the website. Even if you’ve already set goals up, it’s good to have a think about anything else you could use this functionality to track. I’ll be covering different types of goals available, as well as how to use the reports available. Types of Goals There are four different types of things you can set as a goal in Google Analytics:
Destination (URL) Event (often interactions) Time on site Pages per visits
These four work well for different types … [Read more...] about Back to Basics – Goal Reports in Google Analytics

Want to ask Jenny an SEO question for her bi-weekly column? Fill out our form or use #AskAnSEO on social media. This week, we received a question so big, I decided to dedicate an entire post to it. I’ve also received this question multiple times while presenting analytics presentations. How can I filter out spammy referral traffic to my site? I heard Google started filtering them out but still see them. –Kenneth F. via Twitter My static answer when giving presentations is to view the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery and search for referrer spam or block bots or similar. There are some great resources there for people just getting started. But the real answer to this question is a lot bigger, and it has many parts:
Understand what you’re dealing with. It’s not just bots. Filter wisely: Set up a separate view. Block Bots in Analytics. Discover referrers manually. Create a “bad referrer” filter. Block bad bots from the website. Carefully.
Part 1: … [Read more...] about Ask an SEO: Filtering Referral Spam in Google Analytics

This article was originally published on our sister site ClickZ, but it’s so helpful we thought we’d share it here too. Our beginner’s guide to Google Analytics teaches you how to set up an account that is linked to your site and recommends a few basic metrics to look at. Google Analytics is a free service that tracks and reports website traffic. Providing insight into the demographics of site visitors, the performance of a specific campaign, and how long people are staying on your site for, are just a few of the many things the program is capable of. This data gives you an all round better view of how your site is doing and allows you to understand what improvements can be made to make sure you’re optimizing different areas for maximum conversion. In the below tutorial, we will walk you through some basics of Google Analytics and what you need to do in order to get started. Set up an account If you have a major Google account such as Gmail or YouTube, you are … [Read more...] about An absolute beginner’s guide to setting up Google Analytics for your website